Email Marketing Rules

Email marketing can be advantageous for any business, regardless of what product or service is on offer. It is much cheaper than other kinds of advertizing. Moreover, it is good for building trust between your customers and you. As a result, your sales will increase and you will make more profit.

The basis of email marketing is a targeted, voluntary mailing list. If you have a list of subscribers who trust you and consider you an expert in a specific area, you are on the right path.

Here are some rules to help you make and extend your mailing list:

• Provide useful, relevant, unique content. Users won’t subscribe just because your subscription is free of charge. You must provide unique, valuable information, which will be useful to your subscribers.
• Place the subscription form where it can be easily seen. It must be easily accessible, not hidden in the bottom of some unimportant page of your site. If you have a blog, the sidebar is the best place for the subscription form.
• Make the subscription process as simple as possible. Do not make too many mandatory fields, or risk losing potential subscribers! In most cases, the subscriber’s name and email address will be enough.
• Personalize the subscription process. The percentage of subscription confirmations will increase considerably if the users who filled the subscription form are redirected to a webpage where they are addressed by name.
• Be sure to note that all subscriber data are confidential! Many users worry that they may become an easy target of spammers if they subscribe to some mailing list. Explain to your potential subscribers that you guarantee full confidentiality of their data. It’s advisable to make a special page describing your confidentiality policy and put a link to this page below the subscription form.
• Be sincere, persuasive, and honest about what users will get if they subscribe to your mailing list.
• Show an example of your direct email to your site or blog visitors. By doing that, you will let your potential subscribers get acquainted with your mailing list before subscribing and take an informed decision.
  Tell the people about the frequency of your direct emails. Do not flood your subscribers with too many messages!
• Make an archive of your mailing list at your website. Such an archive, containing all issues of your mailing list, may be one more reason for potential users to subscribe. Moreover, it will help you generate additional search traffic for your site.
• Contact other mailing list authors. Let them know that you are willing to mention their mailing lists in your direct emails if they agree to do the same for you. It will help both you and other authors to increase the number of subscribers in less time.
• Be sure to offer useful freebies! Write a book or make a report in the PDF format, and promise to give that freebie to each user who subscribes to your mailing list.
• Offer discounts for your products or services to every subscriber.
• Ask your subscribers to tell other people about your mailing list. Word of mouth is a very effective kind of advertizing, which works greatly for email marketing. If your subscribers consider your content useful and informative, they will be happy to share it with their friends and acquaintances. In this way, you can get a lot of new subscribers.
• Add a subscription link to your email signature.
• Add a Subscribe button to your direct emails. If you use plain text (not HTML) format in your email messages, add a link to the subscription webpage. It may seem unnecessary (because the user is already subscribed to your mailing list), but keep in mind that your subscribers will be forwarding some issues to their friends or acquaintances. So it makes sense to make the subscription process as easy as possible.
• Create a special page for subscription. The separate page for subscribing to your mailing list should be intended for that purpose only. It must have a persuasive header and list all advantages to make your visitors want to subscribe immediately. After creating that page, find out the most popular keywords and run contextual ads.
• Remember to place user testimonials on your subscription page. It’s very important to do that! Place there some 2 or 3 opinions of satisfied users. You can use testimonials in any format, though multimedia (audio or video) formats usually make them more trustworthy. People like to follow other people — that’s human nature.

See also:

• What is Email Lists
• Email Marketing vs SPAM